Sunday, December 13, 2009

We Are Doomed, pt 2

Via Instapundit comes this fascinating story about the origins of the Mediterreanean Sea. What, did you think that it had always been there? The Big Spill Could Have Filled Mediterranean In Less Than Two Years

A cataclysmic flood could have filled the Mediterranean Sea — which millions of years ago was a dry basin — like a bathtub in the space of less than two years. A new model suggests that at the flood’s peak water poured from the Atlantic into the Mediterranean basin at a rate one thousand times the flow of the Amazon River, according to calculations published in the Dec. 10 Nature.

“In an instantaneous flash, the dry Mediterranean became a normal Mediterranean like we see it today,” says lead author Daniel Garcia-Castellanos of Spain's Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas (CSIC) in Barcelona

...

The flood would have had a dramatic effect on local ecosystems, and could even have affected the global climate. The model suggests that global sea level dropped 9.5 meters as a result of the flood. The team points out that a much smaller flood in North America 12,000 years ago has been linked to a worldwide cold snap, and suggests that the Mediterranean flood may have had similarly significant effects.
Climate Change fundamentalists are right about one thing: the climate is changing; it always has been, both globally and locally. What they are wrong about is the extent that modern industry has caused any change and whether any of the progressives' proposed solutions would have any effect.

The fact is that nature has its own schedule and humans are mostly along for the ride. This really should be a humbling moment. After all, if there were no Mediterranean Sea, there would be no Greeks, no Romans, no Jews, no Christians. In short, there would be no western civilization as we know it. Rather than calling for street protests and wealth redistribution to combat Mother Nature, our resources and scientific inquiry would be directed towards adapting to the changes that are inevitably coming our way.

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